A cursory Google of this year’s Turner Prize announcement in London found coverage in the Telegraph, the Guardian, on BBC news and on Channel 4, among others. The same search conducted for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s annual $50,000 art prize that Inuit artist Annie Pootoogook won in October, found coverage from CBC.ca and the arctic paper The Nunatsiaq News.

Annie Pootoogook, Toolbox. Image: The Drawing Society

Montreal Art Blog Zeke’s Gallery published a rant about the lack of media attention, noting that although he found brief coverage in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, he “had to search with a fine tooth comb to find it.” Zeke also noted that the $40,000 Giller Prize, Canada’s literary prize for fiction, attracted considerably more coverage.

Europe’s relationship to culture is firmly embedded in historical tradition, stretching back to ancient Greece and the private collections of the Renaissance.

Greek drinking bowl, 490 BC. Image mystudios.com

The continuation of that tradition is part of what fuels contemporary art’s relevance with the public and the media. In Canada, the lack of a strong historical tradition coupled with the divisive nature of our territory has led to a continual search for national identity. We define ourselves through comparisons to our neighbour, the United States. Furthermore, Canada’s size requires a localized media, making it difficult for those on one coast to relate to events on another, particularly cultural ones. Nonetheless, for the media to virtually ignore a $50,000 contemporary art prize is simply inexcusable.

In the birthplace of erstwhile media guru Marshall McLuhan, Canada’s media remains oblivious to the role that it can (and should) play in the shaping of our visual arts scene.

Marshall McLuhan. Image: wikimedia.org

Public outreach on a grassroots level is common, with a number of art blogs (like this one), gallery and museum newsletters, seminar series, art walks and tours in the country’s larger cities, but they all attract different audiences and the media promotes virtually none of them.

On the other hand, Canada has got a good government granting system for artists on the local, provincial and national levels. There is also a comprehensive network of artist-run-centres like Mercer Union in Toronto, Galerie Werner Whitman in Montreal, The New Gallery in Calgary and Trap\Door in Lethbridge, Helen Pitt Gallery and Access, both in Vancouver.

An opening at the Helen Pitt Gallery. Image: arcco.ca

Canadian artists have also been pioneers in new media art, partly thanks to video distribution agencies like Vtape in Toronto, Videopool in Winnipeg, Groupe Intervention Video in Montreal and Video In in Vancouver (among others) that actively promote Canadian work abroad.

Artists Lisa Steele, Vera Frenkel, Richard Fung, David Rokeby and legendary experimental film artist Michael Snow all have attained significant international attention, and all live in Toronto. In 1977, the Toronto-based artist collective General Idea subverted art’s relationship with the media in an artwork titled Pilot that was aired on TV Ontario. Subsequent works included cablecasts, slowscan transmissions and television broadcasts in the US and Europe. Since many artists make use of artist support networks to sustain their careers rather than opting for commerical gallery representation in Canada, the public remains unaware of the quality of Canadian artists.

Vera Frenkel, This Is Your Messiah Speaking, 1991. Image: artvideo.museevirtuel.ca

Michael Snow, Wavelength, 1967. Image: horschamp.qc.ca

Commercial galleries, meanwhile, are turning to art fairs, museum exhibitions and relationships with curators abroad to expose their artists to an international audience. Galleries that don’t turn to an international collector base end up dividing a very small pie between them, relying on self-educated collectors, many of whom prefer to buy in the U.S or Europe. Many dealers find the situation in Canada intensely frustrating. “Access is harder when there isn’t some debate”, says dealer Jessica Bradley. “The public doesn’t have the means of sensing the zeitgeist – they only hear about art when there’s a huge blockbuster.” Working with an international audience is expensive and impractical, yet judging by the eighteen or so Canadian galleries participating in Miami art fairs this past December, for most it is the better option.

Because media coverage feeds the market by creating consumer interest and then demand, Canada’s lack of visual arts coverage has kept the market terribly undervalued. This is a good thing, I think, since the media can be a double-edged sword. With recent sales of Andy Warhol paintings topping $14 million (US) each and 25-year-old artists selling paintings at Chelsea galleries for $25,000, you have to wonder if the art world has lost its grip on reality. How do artists feel about the situation?

Gerhard Richter was quoted in Der Spiegel last year: “At first it’s nice to hear of such high sums; at the same time it’s horrifying….There is a complete lack of balance between the value and relevance of art and the absurd prices that are paid for it.”

Gerhard Richter, Rosen 1994. Image: kanazawa21.jp

While those of us in the visual arts often bemoan the lack of media attention in Canada, looking at these figures, I wonder if we shouldn’t count our blessings. The opportunity to view other city’s media spectacle from the outside provides a healthy perspective that shouldn’t be underestimated. In the New York Review of Books in 1984, Robert Hughes referred to collector’s confidence in the value of art as being fed by a system that included criticism, journalism and PR: “This creation of confidence… is the cultural artifact of the last half of the twentieth century, far more striking than any given painting or sculpture.”

The Canadian media, to a certain extent, does cover the visual arts, although no artist is in danger of succumbing to art-stardom any time soon. The CBC’s national coverage includes visual art in its cultural programming and CBC.ca has an arts page that covers art-related news. Bravo Television is a self-described “New Style Arts Channel”. The various provinces have government supported cultural programming too, and the Globe and Mail and National Post newspapers feature weekly reviews of museum exhibitions and gallery shows. Nonetheless, the coverage is nowhere near comprehensive enough, partly because there is little crossover between each city’s independent scene. Toronto, the largest art market in the country, is host to Canada’s major art fair,TIAF in October, but even the city’s public galleries don’t host Canadian traveling exhibitions as often as they might. And no venue in Canada has hosted either of the recent international Jeff Wall retrospectives, one of which was at the Tate Modern last year, the other of which is currently touring the United States.

Jeff Wall, Picture for Women, 1979. Image: courses.washington.edu

Jeff Wall, After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue. 1999-2000. Image: buchladen.de

Outside of this country, Wall is perhaps the best-known living contemporary Canadian artist.

There have been some positive changes of late, though. Toronto’s mayor, David Miller has shown an interest in the city’s cultural scene by hosting the city’s first Nuit Blanche this past October. The “All Night Contemporary Art Thing” was a great success, attracting 425,000 people (compared to 140,000 in Montreal, where Nuit Blanche is at the centre of the ten day-long High Lights festival). The media was instrumental in promoting the event, proving that with more exposure, the visual arts would have an eager audience.

The effect of media stardom on so many young artists remains to be seen. How will their practice mature? Will their careers have longevity or burn out after a few years? How will that affect the secondary market for their work? One only has to look at the 80’s art stars whose careers have suffered – Julian Schnabel, David Salle and others, some of whom are presently making a comeback. In Canada, we would do well to take more pride in our visual artists.

The goal should be to increase public awareness, nurturing promising talent without casting young artists as disposable starlets, hot one day and gone the next. Certainly the media has been successful in their support of Canadian film and literature - the average Canadian knows Atom Egoyan and Margaret Atwood. Here’s hoping the public can get to know, and appreciate, great Canadian artists like Jeff Wall, Michael Snow, Rodney Graham and their successors.

*This article was adapted from one published in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue of UK-based art newspaper State of Art.